So, you may have noticed that Nanashi-Inc and Kitty-Kitty.net have been done for a few weeks now?

Yeah, I am so sorry to have just seemingly up and left without any word about it. Initially I took the blogs down to fix a database error that was occurring in both of them. This was around the holidays and since I had family staying with me, I really didn’t get much of a chance to work on the blogs. I would have much preferred to loose myself online for hours than face my relatives (seriously, no need for appetite suppressants with them around! Mean? Yes. True? Definitely.) but I found it hard to work with brats underfoot and nosy relatives looking over my shoulder. Plus I was still “training” so I was working all day then coming home to unwanted guests who stayed until after New Years.

Needless to say, I never got to fix the blogs.

Then, to compound it, the telephone company here (Qwest) began experiencing problems left and right. And, as you may recall, I have dial-up. There was one week where I was pretty much without phone service, and even a few days here and there where pretty much whole counties in NM lost phone service due to other unrelated problems. They’ve been doing a lot of road work around here, so I think the reason this area was experiencing spotty service on and off for about a week was lines being accidentally cut, maybe even turned off, because of the crews.

But the end result was the same. Family was here, no time to blog or fix the blogs. Family gone, shitty service, still no chance to get anything done. Then, finally, I got the time and no spotty service was interfering. I just severely underestimated how time consuming uploading backups would be on a slow connection.

As to the problem that resulted in the blogs coming down? Honestly I don’t understand it. Everything seemed to be fine, but then I noticed that even though I was writing posts just fine, when I “published” them the page was blank or had a lot of funny characters and symbols in place of the actual body. BUT! If I signed in to the backend and edited a post the content was all there. Granted there would be some funny symbols in there too, but it was intact. This was happening on the databases for Kitty-Kitty and N-I. I tried repairing the database, but nothing seemed to work. Thankfully I had backups of the db so I copied down the posts that were messing up and took the blogs down so that I could upload the backup copies of the database.

Yeah, I hit a snag though. N-I is old and thus has a big db. Do you know how long it took to upload on a dial-up connection? Especially one that was sometimes up and fine then suddenly gone because the phone lines were down…again.

Then of course comes the fact that I work in the days so by the time I got home I didn’t really feel like fooling around with aggravating things. So I ended up waiting until my training was over (no longer working full time five days a week then…just part time six days a week Doh!), family was gone, and the phone lines were reliable once again.

But the blogs are back up now thankfully! Over the next week all of the posts that got screwed up will be brought back online as I re-type them. Also, posts that I (and Denali!) made during the down time and saved in a word document will be posted as well.

Heh, so expect some jumping and jiving to be going on on your feeds!

Ugh, really wish I could go crawl away and hide under a rock for a while and forget about all upcoming obligations and bills.

October has become the month I love to hate now; which is sad because I have always loved October. What with all the candy, horror movies, changing weather, and Halloween – what’s not to love? But alas with the onset of October comes a great deal of hassles that just all pile up at once. Bleh. What kind of hassles am I talking about? Well, let’s see:

1. domain renewal for kitty-kitty.net
2. domain renewal for nanashi-inc.net
3. car insurance is due ($260)
4. just paid the hosting for my site
5. tags for the car

All of this is on top of the regular expenses I have to take care on a limited income. And let’s not even get started on all the home-improvement projects I got lined up.

And did I mention that I just started jury duty? Yeah, it might not be so bad if I didn’t have to travel all the way to Las Cruces, wait around for a few hours, then be sent home because I wasn’t picked. Wasted gas, wasted time, and money lost to boot. Ugh.

If it’s my day to report at least pick me damnit!

Honestly, it’s enough to make me wanna run away somewhere for a vacation and just hide. (Those Branson vacation packages I’ve been seeing look very good right now!) Except, of course, for the fact that they cost money, money I don’t have.

Eep! N-I.net experienced a little unexpected down time earlier today. My deepest apologies for that. It seems Joana forgot to update her credit card information and the hosting plan did not get renewed on time. To top it off, I still have the alerts going to my Yahoo! account (which I never check) and the notification about renewing my hosting was buried in the spam mailbox between emails about something Obama and herpes cures. I only actually noticed when some folks said a link to a post I had posted was dead. I then went to login to my blog and, whoops, there’s the suspended account page in place of N-I.net.

But yeah, that’s all fixed now and we’re back in business!

I really wanted to take a moment to let folks know that, while I have no plans to just abandon my Fanfiction.net account, I will also be posting all of my fanfiction at my live journal from now on as well. I’ve gotten very lax about updating the personal site aspect of this domain ever since I set up my blog on WP and as a result, my creative writings on here have been badly neglected. I like the ease with which readers can comment and critique my work on FF.net and it’s certainly easier to upload a document there then it is to code it and upload it to my personal site.

However, there seems to be a group of people that have taken it upon themselves to determine what is and is not a “good fic”. They’ve set up their own account on Fanfiction.net and have a bot program run through the site, it chooses fics that it’s criterion determines is “bad” and then the “account” reports it to FF.net mods to be removed for supposed rule infractions. Despite the site’s TOS stating that bot programs are not to be run in such a manner, this group is still there and going strong. The Redbotton issue, as it’s being referred to, is just a mess and utterly wrong. So what if some fics are badly written? How else are those authors going to improve if they don’t show their work and get constructive criticism and feedback?

Not to mention, not everyone’s tastes run the same and this really just seems like a way for a select group of people to find stories that they don’t agree with, for whatever reason and not necessarily because they’re poorly written, and get them removed.

While I’ve always preferred FF.net for reading and following stories to LJ, I recognize a lot of folks do prefer LJ to FF.net. And honestly, after this, I’m leaning towards LJ myself now. And what do you know, LJ has an easy way for readers to leave feedback and critiques too. So, I’ve decided to turn my dead LJ account into a fiction writing account. I’ve posted my newest stuff there and plan to go over the old stuff that I deem salvageable after a lot of cleaning up, and will re-post it on there as well. Granted, I don’t really write that much anymore, but when I do, I don’t want to have to worry about some radical group submitting stuff they don’t like to be deleted.

I’ve been quite the busy little bee here online lately. Sadly that isn’t reflective in my blog history though. I’ve mostly been doing a lot of work on my sites, both graphics and coding, with the occasional side-project here and there from a client. Mostly though I’ve been putting in long-needed work on my listings.

I got the fanlistings for “Sign” by FLOW, “Omae Dattanda” by Kishidan, and “Dareka ga” by PUFFY AmiYumi up that you might recall me mentioning before. Hehe, I’m still super-excited I got approved for those listings! I have google ads on two of them, down on the footer, and for the life of me I just couldn’t understand why the ads were showing those public service ads (like city of Philadelphia jobs) that appear when there are no ads matching the content. I figured, these are sites about SONGS and I mention on there that they were used in an anime series and movie. Good keywords there, right? Ah, well, while I might have used those words in the content I forgot to add in the meta tags for keywords and description so the google ads weren’t doing so hot. Oops. Well, I fixed that now.

I’ve done a lot of coding fixing on some of the older listings, and I even managed to get a new layout put up at Toxic Swill the Beer Hatelisting:

As the name implies, Toxic Swill is a hatelisting that lists the number of people who hate a particular subject, in this case beer. And yes, as the owner, I happen to hate beer. I just cannot stand the smell or the taste of it. It’s just disgusting to me. Give me hard liquor, wine, or coolers, but never, ever beer.

Since I was up early today (read: up since 12am because my sleep-schedule is all messed up again) I should have gotten dressed and gone into town today and gotten my car insurance paid. Instead I stayed planted in front of the computer and finished getting the site up for It Was You: Omae Dattanda Fanlisting!

Yes, that’s right, I got the approvals from TAFL to build and run the fanlistings I mentioned back in December, and all three were approved! Right now, the fanlisting for Omae Dattanda, the 11th ending theme for Naruto Shippuuden, by Kishidan is up and running and awaiting members:

I hope to get the fanlistings for Sign by FLOW (6th Naruto Shippuuden opening theme) and Dareka ga by PUFFY [AmiYumi] (3rd Shippuuden movie theme) up in the next few days.

I almost didn’t open the approval emails when I got them because when they arrived in my inbox it was still April 1st and I was afraid it was a cruel April Fools joke. Glad to see it wasn’t though!

Did anybody get fooled on April Fools?

Today was a long, tedious, and exhausting day.

First I woke up early so I could get the girls (Isis and Denali) up to town today for their physical and interviews (a local agency is actually “hiring” cats for modeling in media). There actually weren’t that many people that responded to the ad apparently, and despite the fact that Isis and Denali were among the better behaved kitties there, they probably won’t be getting any “jobs” sadly. Isis and Denali are all up to date on their shots, are in wonderful health (some couldn’t believe Isis is actually 14 years!), and unlike most of the cats that were brought in, Isis and Denali obey commands like “up”, “down”, “stay”, and “follow”. In the instances where they hesitate, all I have to say is “kitchen”, which Denali and Isis translate as “FOOD!” and their hesitance is gone. Yet despite this, after every stage of their “audition” people felt the need to comment on how it was “such a shame they’re not pure breeds”.

I seriously hate it when people judge pets by their pedigree. Just because they’re of a mixed breed does not mean the animal in question is any less “desirable”.

In any case, I was given the distinct impression that the lack of a pedigree will keep Isis and Denali from getting a call back. Disheartening really as Isis seemed to be eating the attention up. Seriously, I just know that kitty knew exactly what was going on and loved every minute of it. I expected her to act as she does at the vet’s office, instead she was a little prima donna.

After that ordeal, I took the girls back home then went up to ‘Cruces to run a few errands before donating plasma. Ugh, I swear every time I go something goes wrong. Today my blood was clotting up badly so instead of donating plasma I donated more blood than anything else. You see, the machine draws your blood out, separates the plasma from the blood and sends the plasma to the container while sending your blood back into you. Well, since my blood was clotting so badly, my blood was drawn out, got clogged up in the machine and very little of the plasma actually went into the collection container. To top it off, my blood wasn’t returning to me either. Eventually, because of the “shock” of having so much blood drawn, the continuance of my blood clotting, and the way my veins were acting, it was decided that they would switch arms to re-stick me and then return my blood to me that way as the arm I was using was bruising already. Even then, immediately after sticking me on my other arm, the area around my vein swelled and started bruising.

And did I mention my arms are sore where they stuck me still?

After that I decided to grab something in town, which kinda put a dent in my healthy eating and will probably be reflected in the weigh in on PixieWire to boot. Ah! For those that don’t know, PixieWire.net is a blog I created in January to keep track of progress towards becoming a healthier and happier me. I hesitate to call it simply a diet blog, simply because it also focuses on my emotional/mental health as well. I’m afraid you won’t be finding anything like a Jenny Craig review on there, as I am not enrolled in any such programs or taking any special drugs, just good old fashioned exercise and eating right. Still, I’m sure it’ll be good for a laugh! You can always smirk and giggle at my attempts to drop from an unhealthy 246 lbs to a slimmer 160 lbs.

Well, in any case, after all of that, then coming home to clean and logging on to my blogs to find them out of date (new version of wordpress!) and several plugins needing to be updated, not to mention my backlogged emails, and re-installing some more stuff to the laptop after the re-install of Windows, I’m just exhausted and ready to hit the sack.

Major run-on sentence there, yes I know.

It turns out I was right, the program “Internet Security 2010″ from Kaspersky was what crashed my computer.

According to the guys at PC Fix, that program has actually been a bane to a number of people and resulted in the same thing that happened to me. A complete re-install of Windows. The software downloads itself, screws with Windows, and you can’t do anything on your computer or with it unless you choose to play by the software’s rules and pay to activate the software.

Be advised, the anti-virus programs like AVG, Norton, McAfee, and Avira have trouble blocking it and the software itself, if installed, can hamper and disable virus protection.

The way I got it was through a popup that loaded on a file sharing site (Rapidfire I believe). When the popup loaded it said it was scanning my computer for problems. I tried to close the popup and received an alert button that gave me the option to continue the scan and stay on the page by clicking “cancel” or purchasing the software by hitting “buy”. Obviously Neither of those were what I wanted to do so I ultimately had to alt +ctrl + delete it and close out Firefox entirely. The program still managed to download itself though and screwed up everything though.

PC Fix was able to recover some of my data for me, and now I’m stuck re-installing Windows updates (like the service packs) and the programs I just can’t live without (Photoshop!). My humongous music collection is gone though, I was more concerned that the files under my Documents and Pictures folders be recovered as that had my layouts, projects in progress, and business documentation, and other important things and this was a lot of data to recover as well.

And what did it cost? Including labor, tax, and data recovery (which included a backed up copy on a dvd) the total came out to…. $63 dollars. Not bad really, but when you don’t have money to spend it still hurts. Still though, PC Fix was awesome. Took it it Monday morning and it was ready for pick-up late Monday evening, and there were a lot of people ahead of me to boot. So you know they were slaving away to maintain their “ready in one business day” motto that they aim for. No need for anti wrinkle treatments with these guys, they take the stress away and keep you from fretting over a ridiculous sized bill to boot. Love ‘em!

And my music library, all 20gb is gone and I just can’t be bothered to re-install it all on the laptop either. I’ve installed some tunes, but not much. It’s not even 1gb! Mostly it’s just anime and movie soundtracks right now.

So yeah, beware of Internet Security 2010 software from Kaspersky. Whatever you do, avoid sites that support it and advertise it as there might be popups or other ads there that try to download it onto your computer.

I’ve been scouring the job searches and postings looking for employment for what seems like forever now. I’ve had horrid luck in that department too and I couldn’t fathom why I would possibly be turned down with comments like “you don’t possess the qualities we’re looking for” and similar given to me. Well, at long last, the answer was revealed. I mistakenly left a woman who has bad relations with my mother as a reference and she’s been happily bad mouthing me. Joy. I caught that though (finally!) and fixed my resume, I’ve been earning a little more money on side jobs and small design gigs too so I thought things were looking up for me.

Then, last night, while I was doing updates on the laptop and commenting on blogs my computer got attacked by multiple viruses all at once. Seriously, Avira was blocking attacks back to back, think there was like eight. I thought they got blocked but something clearly went through because, alas, the blue screen of death appeared a few minutes later and then the computer shut down. When I brought it back up it said that the RUN.dll wasn’t working. I did a restore to a previous backup point, and that fixed that problem, but then Windows itself said it wasn’t working. And then there was a new program installed on my computer that I never downloaded let alone installed.

The program that installed itself was called something like 2010 Internet Security, it downloaded and installed itself. It said I had 20+ viruses, worms, and trojans on my computer and wanted me to pay $49.99 to get the paid version and remove the threats. Poor Avira Antivirus was going crazy trying to block the fucker as it did it’s “scan” too. I tried to go to the control panel and uninstall the 2010 Internet Security thing from the programs list, well guess what, it wasn’t even there.

I suspect the thing downloaded and installed itself when a popup loaded earlier that day. I was on someone’s site, can’t remember who, and got bombarded with popups. One of which said something along the lines of “your computer may be infected, do a scan with…” and when I tried to close that window an alert message came up asking me if I was sure I wanted to close the window, but instead of having an “ok” and “cancel” button it just had the “cancel” button. In other words, you couldn’t close the popup. I ended up having to ctrl + alt + delete and close out Firefox entirely.

That event, coupled with the Weather Channel plugin that would never uninstall no matter how many times you “uninstalled” it, clued me in that something was going on somewhere. So I started checking to make sure Spybot, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Adaware, and Avira Antivirus were all up to date and was about to do scans, when BAM!, blue screen of death and the laptop shut down. Then of course, when I brought it back up, there was the RUN.dll error, then the restore, and then the “Windows has encountered an error and shut down” and from there nothing works. And in the mean time, that stupid program that downloaded itself was running in the background doing scans and telling me I have some worm that could potentially steal my information.

Uh, yeah, you’re the worm you sorry sack of monkey-spunk! And of course this all happens when I’ve got a ton of work to do too. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night and now I’ve got dark circles under my eyes. I must look something awful since the cashier at Staples was looking at me like I might reach over the counter and attack her. Honestly, I was in a fair mood too sense I was able to catch an 8gb Sandisk flash drive on sale for $14.99. It was a sale that I couldn’t pass up, even with the impending computer repair expense.

My laptop crashed before and I took it to PC Fix and was really impressed with how fast they got it fixed, how cheap it was, and that they were able to do data recovery and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg for that as well. I’ll be taking my laptop to them this time too. Alas, they’re closed on the weekends so the earliest I can take it in to them is Monday, assuming they’re not closed in observance of President’s Day. They are a small locally owned business after all and they are in Las Cruces, the town that seems to shut down on every holiday. Hopefully they can get it up and running that same day like they did last time.

In the mean time, I’m gonna be MIA for a bit. As it is, I had to borrow the computer at my Mom’s office to make this post. So yeah, I’ll be slow answering emails and returning comments for the next few days as I get this straightened out and then play catch up.

To be honest, when I created my very first fanlisting I never thought the day would come when I decided to give it away. I just could not fathom the thought of adopting out a fanlisting. Why would you do that? And yet here I am planning on finding new homes for a few of my babies.

A little while back one of my listings was removed from the Animefanlistings.org network, it had been troubled but I never knew until it had been removed and opened for application. Even then, the only reason I knew something was up was because I had posted on the TAFL message boards checking to make sure an application form I sent in went through and was shocked to be informed that my email was bouncing. On the off-chance that something had been troubled I checked the network update blog and was astonished to see my Naruto & Temari fanlisting had been troubled, and with no response, was removed. A thorough check of my email account showed that I had received no notice of this but that I had received a lot of emails about fat burners and other things I neither care about or understand.

As you might have guessed, my emails at nanashi-inc.net have been flooded with spam. To be honest, it’s a rather overwhelming amount of spam and it’s been happening for a few months now.

Thankfully my NaruTema fanlisting has been re-added to the TAFL network, and to avoid a repeat, I’ve changed my contact email at the networks to a non-domain email account. While doing this I was determined to track down the flood of spam and soon identified the culprit: DodosMail a php mail form that I used for my contact forms at various fansites, fanlistings, and other sites here on the N-I.net network. Apparently the script is insecure and allows for multiple ways for spammers to abuse it. I’d used DodosMail for years now, literally, and everything seemed fine but when I thought about it I realized that there was a noticeable increase of spam to the email accounts associated with the form. After deleting it and installing Jem’s php mail form there was a very noticeable drop in spam. Instead of pages and pages of spam delivered by the hour (including mailer-daemon notices for emails I never sent) there was just the odd handful.

While fooling around with the mail forms I started noticing a lot of listings whose coding was just embarrassing. Stuff like using tables in lieu of divs, deprecated coding, in-code styling that should be in a stylesheet, and so on. I started fixing it up listing by listing and while doing so I started thinking about the listings I owned as I worked on them. While doing this I came to the realization that for some of these, while I’m still a fan, my interest has waned dramatically. In some cases I can’t help but wonder if the fanlisting really would be better off in the care of someone else. After those depressing thoughts I realized that if I’m thinking those things then they probably would be better off with someone who could better love them and properly care for them.

Which brings us to the point of this post. It is with a heavy heart that I am placing the following fanlistings up for adoption:

• Objects: Samsung SCH-a950^x
• Anime/Manga Songs: s-CRY-ed: All I Need is Love (insert song)^x
• Anime/Manga Songs: s-CRY-ed: Drastic My Soul (ending theme)^x
• Songs: Bands/Groups: I’m So Sick (Flyleaf)^±
• Songs: Bands/Groups: Move (Thousand Foot Krutch)^x
• Food/Drinks: Hershey’s: 5th Avenue^x

^± – means the KIM list has been contacted
^x – means the listing will be closed if no new home is found

I’ll be posting adoption threads for these listings at the TFL and TAFL message boards shortly and will be contacting the members of the listings in a week or so.

If you are a fan of one (or more) of these subjects and would like to adopt them please visit this page to read my guidelines for adoption (very basic) and fill out the application form located there.

I got an interesting email a little while back. More messages about a new or great health insurance lead or checking one’s credit scores? No, nothing as blegh as that. I got the approval from The Animefanlistings.org to run the fanlisting for the Godaime Mizukage from Naruto!

I spent a couple of days working on the layout and getting it up. And then, because the Mizukage is hawt and awesome, I had to add some content to it so that it was no longer just a fanlisting but a fansite for the Mizukage. It’s finished now, for the most part, and new content will be added when new information about her becomes available. I present to you Boiling Hot: the Godaime Mizukage fanlisting and shrine:

For those that don’t know or recognize this character, the Godaime Mizukage made her first appearance in chapter 454 of the manga when the Kage of the other five major villages were getting ready to attend the Kage Summit to deal with the threat that Akatsuki poses. If you’re only following the anime (Japan or US) you will not have met her yet sadly. I’m not up to date with the manga as it is released in the US so I’m not even sure if the US fans who are only reading the English manga have even met her yet. I don’t think so though. There is a wealth of information on her at the fansite though, so if you’re curious please visit and take the time to get to know this awesome character. She’s one of few female ninja who kicks butt and looks good while doing it. And of course, if you’re a fan please consider joining as well.

About the same time that I got the approval to build the fanlisting for the Mizukage I was already working on a new layout for Whirl: the Temari and Uzumaki Naruto fanlisting. I’m still not sure that I am completely satisfied with the final product, however, it was time for a new look. The old layout had been up for quite some time now and consisted of images from before the time skip. Specifically the chuunin exam and rescue Sasuke arc. We’re well into Naruto Shippuuden now so I felt it was time for an upgrade.

And since Whirl got a new layout and Boiling Hot was all new I decided it wouldn’t be right to ignore Bonds of Friendship. Just yesterday I got the new layout for Bonds of Friendship: the Sai and Uzumaki Naruto fanlisting and fanshrine put up. It’s very green, yes I know, but it is much easier on the eyes than the old orange and black layout was.

So how about that, all of my Naruto fanlistings got new layouts (in a sense), new link buttons, and I had my own layout marathon! Makes me wish I had joined in on of the anime layout marathons going on, but oh well.

Are you a fan of any of these subjects? If yes, and you haven’t already, please consider joining them. If you own a Naruto-related fanlisting or fansite and would like to affiliate please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Well I feel like a bit of an idiot now. I completely spazzed on the fact that the domain name for my cats’ blog was fixing to expire and didn’t renew it in time. In fact, if Angel hadn’t noticed that there was nothing there I might not have noticed for another day or so. Sad, isn’t it?

In my defense though I am used to renewing domains every couple of years versus every year, which for some odd reason, Namecheap forces me to do for kitty-kitty.net. I have no idea why, but when I purchased it I could only purchase it for a year and when I went to re-purchase/renew it, again, only the one-year option was available. What’s up with that? Here’s hoping we don’t have a repeat next year.

I’m just entirely grateful that no one decided to snap up kitty-kitty.net in the meantime. So now that I’ve got the kinks with the login pages for N-I and K-K fixed and the name servers have propagated the blogging can once again commence.

As you can see I’m up bright and early this morning. Got to get some cleaning done now and then shower and get ready to go. I’m heading out shopping today, specifically looking for plasma tvs too. Not for me though, my neighbor is looking to get one for her son and his wife for Christmas and apparently I would make the perfect one to help her pick one out.

Honestly, what would I know about plasma tvs? I don’t own one, heck, I don’t even watch tv much anymore. I’m seriously not going to be any help at all.

Ah yes, today was a very good night for me. I had a pretty decent night on the sales floor. Now granted, it wasn’t one of my best, but it was definately better than what I’ve been having here lately. But to top it all off, I came home to see two awesome emails sitting in my inbox:

Hi Joana,

Congratulations! Your application to build and run the Teen Titans: Jinx (Characters) fanlisting in the Animation category at The Fanlistings Network has been approved!

Awesome right? It gets better:

Hi Joana,

Congratulations! Your application to build and run the Teen Titans: Aqualad (Characters) fanlisting in the Animation category at The Fanlistings Network has been approved!

That certainly beats any of the atypical emails about “diet pills” and “confirming my order for ???” that I see cluttering up my inbox daily. So yes, I got approvals for both Jinx and Aqualad’s fanlistings today from TFL.org Isn’t that awesome? And, as you know, I started working on the layouts for the fanlistings a couple of days ago and they’re both pretty much ready and raring to go already.

Power of the Sea: the Aqualad fanlisting is up and running, I just need to finish typing up the information page.

Lucky Day: the fanlisting and fansite for Jinx is also up and ready to accept new members. I still need to flesh out the content of the fansite, but the fanlisting is all set.

And now I must go take a shower. We had “Crazy Hair Day” at work today and I have a ton of gel and glitter to wash out of my hair now. As soon as I find the cable for my camera I’ll upload the pictures I took of my hairdo.

Oh dear me, I’ve done it again. I applied for two new fanlistings and I’m already working on their layouts. Well, actually, one of them is already finished. I just have to finish working on the content since it’s going to be a mini-fansite -slash- fanlisting. The other I’m just going to leave as a fanlisting…I think. So which fanlistings have I applied for? I’ll give you three hints.

Hint no.1: They’re both characters from an animated television series I’m obsessed with. As in, I even have all of the seasons on DVD.

Hint no.2: They’re both DC comic book characters, one being a hero and the other being a former villain cum heroine (in the series).

Hint no.3: Err…yeah…this is the dead give away hint.

Yes that’s right folks, when I saw that both Jinx and Aqualad no longer had fanlistings at The Fanlistings Network anymore I had to apply for them. And yes, I know, I’m doubly bad for already getting the layouts made and the sites up. I know you’re supposed to wait for the approval, but I was just so excited. I was actually rather disappointed though to see so many other characters who formerly had fanlistings were no longer listed. Bumblebee, Kid Flash, Argent, Gizmo, Mammoth, Speedy, Cyborg, and Robin deserve fanlistings! Heck, I’m really surprised to see Robin and Cyborg’s fanlistings closed. Even the Raven & Beast Boy relationship fanlisting is gone.

Believe me when I say that this Teen Titans fanatic is very tempted to apply for a few other Titans fanlistings *cough*Kid Flash, RavenxBB, Kid FlashxJinx, Speedy, Argent*cough*

In any case, Jinx’s fanlisting is ready to go. I just to finish typing up a few of the content pages, as well as maybe make a few more codes, and voila. Aqualad I just started working on. THe basic design of the layout is done, but I really want to design and background for the fanlisting instead of having a sold black background. I still need to make some codes as well. Not to mention I am planning on getting a new layout for the Aqualad & Raven fanlisting, along with some new codes for that fanlisting as well as the Teen Titans: All Characters fl as well.

Heh, it’s a good thing my laptop memory and diskspace is pretty decent. I logged a lot of hours the past couple of days working on those layouts. Mainly because I had to go through my dvd collection and screen cap a bunch of episodes then of course came the actual designing in Photoshop. And of course, I can’t work on layouts without having some music to jam to, so iTunes was going full throttle the whole time. So, media player, iTunes, and Photoshop CS3 all at once. Poor lappytop needs a break now.

Yup, that’s right, Brand New Day, my fanlisting for the science fiction television series Cleopatra 2525 has finally received a new look.

I’m actually rather ashamed to admit that I’ve had the screencaps needed for the new layout and new codes sitting on my laptop’s hard drive for several months now. Yeah, I took the screencaps back in June or so and planned to make some new codes but never got around to doing it. Then I had planned to make a new layout as well, but then I just kept putting it off. Eventually I got my butt in gear and put it all together in celebration of the new year that is upon us. Imagine, I opened that fanlisting up in November of ’05 and it had the same layout until just recently.

I’m also converting it into a sort of fansite as well, so I’ll be adding pages and pages of content to it soon too. If you’re a fan of Cleopatra 2525 why not head on over and join today?

Now if only I could remember to get all of the images and videos off of my sd card and get them taken care of. Eh, one step at a time I suppose.

As you might have noticed, Nanashi-Inc has under gone a minor change in design. Many of you may even recognize this theme from October of last year. Yes, that’s right folks, it’s October which means two things. As you may (or may not) know, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

This year I’m taking my support for breast cancer research a step further. Instead of just making my normal donation I am going to donate all of my blogad and textlink earnings to Komen as well. All monies earned from ads sold during the month of October will be donated to Komen. Help me raise the bar of the donation and get some traffic for your site as well by buying an ad. There are three options available for, you can purchase a slot in my Blog Ads unit (to your left), a text link spot on the right hand navigation here, or a textlink ad on the sidebar of my book blog.

And don’t forget to check out the Boobie-Thon either folks! Over the past few years, Boobie-Thon has raised over $40,000.00 for Breast Cancer research – quite an admirable feat! This year’s event will be running from October 1, 2008 until 11:59pm on October 7, 2008. You can help spread the word by blogging about it, donating, or even contributing your own photos.

I’m feeling rather proud of myself right now. Not only have I fixed the error that was occurring on my book review blog after updating WordPress, but I also updated the version of WordPress running on this blog as well. I’ve also updated almost all of the plugins used on The Symposium, but I still have a few more to update here on Nanashi-Inc. So troublesome.

One of my favorite plugins, Different Posts Per Page still needs to be updated on both blogs, but I hate updating it. I always end up having to sign up (again) for the newsletter and then having to click through an ad portal to get to the plugin. I understand that the guy makes awesome plugins and all, and I’m grateful they’re free, but the hassle to download it makes it almost not worth it. Since I first found the plugin I have never updated it as soon as the updates are released. I always put it off and put it off because it’s such a hassle just to download the plugin, let alone upload and then activate it.

Anyway, since I’ve updated the blogs now there might be some errors floating around. I know that two of my favorite plugins, WP Slimstat and the LJ Crossposter supposedly don’t work with WP versions 2.5 and up so I didn’t even bother to activate them. However, as far as I know, all of my other plugins work fine. If you guys notice anything wonky please let me know.

Argh! I tried to update the version of WordPress that I had running on The Symposium but it came out wonky. The .CSS for the admin side is off and I don’t know how to fix it. I’ve deleted the files and replaced them I don’t know how many times now. I’ve even downloaded the WP files multiple times now from the WP site, so it’s not that the download I had got messed up.

On top of that, my error log keeps showing me an error on the settings page. Something about a missing taxonomy class, function does not exist and all that shit. Since I didn’t do any fiddling with the database and just followed the instructions (wordpress is the one that “upgraded” my database) I don’t know what the hell is causing that error.

I think I just might create a new DB and install everything from scratch. If the problem already exists in the database I have, then restoring it to the previous one and doing the install again isn’t going to do much good, is it?

I hate upgrading scripts.

Well I had a bit of a blonde moment earlier. Actually, I guess if I just didn’t know, then it’s not so much a blonde moment but an “idiot moment”, right? Anyway, my grandfather was moaning and groaning about how after spending the morning at the doctor’s office (routine stuff by the way) he got dragged all around town looking at Asanti grilles, none of which met with the satisfaction of his friend who wanted one.

Now see, I didn’t realize what Asanti grilles were and I thought it was some special brand of grills, as in barbecue grills. So I told him to tell his friend to just chill and wait for the ads, since Memorial Day is coming up there are going to be a bunch of barbecue and picnic stuff going on sale. Right? Needless to say he busted up laughing at my stupidity.

Now here’s the “blonde inspiration” bit of the post. At long last, Got A Problem the Anime Haters/Bashers Hatelisting has a new layout! I only had the old one up when I first created the hatelisting…back in 2005.

Layout version 2.0: Angry Blonds, features, from left to right, Sarugaki Hiyori (Bleach), Robin Senna (Witch Hunter Robin), Uotani “Uo” Arisa (Fruits Basket), Temari (Naruto), Seto Ringo (Angelic Layer), and Shiina Yuuya (Samurai Deeper Kyo). In the statistics box there at the bottom of the screencap you can Yamanaka Ino (naruto) as well. I was watching some old episodes of Bleach recently and Hiyori’s violent reactions totally inspired me to get my ass in gear and get a new layout up for the hatelisting. I had to make a layout with Hiyori in it, and then after that I just decided to make a layout featuring some well-known and not-so-well known angry blonds from multiple series.

On top of the new layout I had to do some major cod tidying up as well. Lots of open html commands that should have been closed, not to mention style coding in the content that could better be handled in the stylesheet, and even some garbled bits that I had no idea what I was trying to do. I also made 42 new link buttons for people to link back with, bringing the listing’s total to 133 with more planned for later this week. So…what do you guys think of the new look?

Now, if you dislike/hate anime-haters/bashers, why not come and join?

Yosh! I’ve been away for a bit, but by the end of this post you’ll understand why. Actually, more than likely, you’ll be shaking your head at me…

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on my latest fanlisting, which is now up and running by the way, for Brad Crawford from Weiss Kreuz. The original design I had in mind floundered and died forcing me to realize (yet again) that my coding skills are non-existent. I could get it to work in one browser but not the other. No matter how I tinkered with the code, IE and FF would not see things eye to eye. So I changed it from divs to tables, still didn’t work. In the end I scrapped it and took a portion of the original header, edited it, and ran with a new design. It came out great but I’m still irked my original intention crashed and burned.

I was also stumped for a name for a bit then ended up discussing my favorite choice with a friend. That turned out to be a bad idea. Basically, she thought I should find a nice bit of sturdy theater rope (because apparently it’s great for making nooses) and hang myself now, because I clearly was not a “true” fan if I thought “Egotist” was a suitable name for his fanlisting. I say a real fan can admit to the flaws in their favorite characters and love them regardless. So what was her great suggestion for a name? It was “Oracle”. For those that don’t know, that’s his code name. Ooh, real original.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of Crawford, then please head on over to Egotist, the TAFL approved fanlisting for Brad Crawford, and join today!

…Is now up and running folks! Buawahahaha! It took me a bit, especially since I was stumped on the name, but at long last, the IchiHitsu fanlisting is up and ready to accept new members. So if you’re a fan of the relationship between these two, be it platonic or romantic, then please consider joining today:

I swear my eyes are about to fall out of my head, they’re so tired. I spent all evening tinkering with the coding on the new fanlisting. Mostly just tweaking the CSS stylesheet since I had the skeleton of the site up and it was just waiting on images really. Then after that I finished uploading some manga scans to the manga section on the Vizard fansite and fanlisting. This morning I went back and added the new chapter, -104 of the Pendulum Arc, and finished updated the background information on the characters to reflect the new information released. *sigh* It was so hard to keep the section pertaining to the present-day Bleach timeline from becoming riddled with spoilers. Naturally there are some, but not nearly as much as there could have been. Naturally, the section pertaining to the Vizard as they were during the Pendulum Arc is just a full blown spoiler happy hour. I didn’t even bother filter that one.

Now I think I’m going to rest my weary eyes, grab something to eat, and throw back a tall glass of ice tea.